Matzke Fine Art and Design

Marcel Schwarb

Artist Statement: 

As a career architect, I developed a great appreciation for the fundamentals of good drawing, design and composition. For me, painting emerged from my architectural background and is the method by which I express my observations of the natural beauty around me. I work to achieve a balance between realism and abstraction and to find a unique point of view with my subjects. 

In my architectural studies, I learned about seeing, critiquing, sketching, building, designing, detailing and construction. I was a practicing architect for 32 years. I began painting with soft pastels as a natural progression from pencil sketching to painting with a stick in hand, but using bold and vivid color. Today I paint mostly in acrylics. 

About these paintings: 

I visited the large hill town of Guanajuato in central Mexico.
regulations were non-existent on how people could build their homes, most notably, any color, size or shape. Viewing the jumble of buildings from a distance was overwhelming and amazing at the same time, so I chose to paint small vignettes of some houses to capture the essence of this collage of structures. I then experimented with a poured acrylic process: I poured a clear high-gloss medium over the top of the paintings and waited 24 hours for the medium to dry. I then added additional strokes of paint and matte medium, while still allowing some bits of the high gloss to show through for added sparkle and depth.